This invention relates to communication, and primarily to wireless communication.
Physical limitations of wireless channels present a fundamental technical challenge to reliable communication. Bandwidth limitations, propagation loss, time variance, noise, interference, and multipath fading make the wireless channel a narrow "pipe" that does not easily accommodate the flow of data. Further challenges come from power limitation, size, and speed of devices that are employed within portable wireless apparatus. Employing multiple transmit antennas at both the base and the remote stations increases the capacity of wireless channels, and information theory provides a measure of this increase. The standard approach to exploit this capacity is linear processing at the receiver, as described, for example, by J. Winters, J. Salz and R. D. Gitlin, in "The impact of antenna diversity an the capacity of wireless communication systems" IEEE Trans. Communications, Vol. 42. No. 2/3/4, pp. 1740-1751, Feb/March/April 1994. Transmit diversity has been explored by Wittneben in "Base station modulation diversity for digital SIMULCAST," Proc. IEEE'VTC, pp. 505-511, May 1993, and by Seshadri and Winters in "Two signaling schemes for improving the error performance of frequency-division-duplex (FDD) transmission systems using transmitter antenna diversity," International Journal of Wireless Information Networks, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1994. The Wittneben and Seshadri et al papers approach transmit diversity from a signal processing point of view.
Space-time codes combine signal processing at the receiver with coding techniques appropriate to multiple transmit antennas. See, for example, V. Tarokh, N. Seshadri, and A. R. Calderbank in "Space-Time Codes For High Data Rate Wireless Communication: Performance Analysis and Code Construction," IEEE Trans. Info. Theory, Vol. 44, No. 2, pp. 744-765, March 1998. The space-time approach provides significant gain over the aforementioned prior art. Specific space-time codes designed for 2-4 transmitting antennas perform well in slowly varying fading environments (such as indoor transmission) and come with in 2-3 dB of the theoretical outage capacity. Outage capacity is described, for example, by J. Foschini, Jr. and M. J. Gans, "On limits of wireless communication in a fading environment, when using multiple antennas," Wireless Personal Communication, Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 311-335, March 1998. The bandwidth efficiency of the codes described in the Tarokh et al paper is about 3-4 times that of the current systems. The most important contributor to the improved performance is diversity, which may be thought of as providing a number of replicas of the transmitted signal to the receiver, with some replicas being less attenuated by fading. The space-time codes presented in the Tarokh et al paper provide an optimized trade-off between constellation size, data rate, diversity gain, and trellis complexity
When the number of transmit antennas is fixed, decoding complexity (measured by the number of trellis states in the decoder) increases exponentially with transmission rate. This can be refined to some extent by designing space-time codes with a multi-level structure and adopting multi-stage decoding, as described by Tarokh et al. For a moderate number of transmit antennas (3-6), this method provides higher data rates while reducing the decoding complexity. However, there is a penalty to be paid for simplified decoding. Multi-stage decoding is sub-optimal, due in part to magnification in the error coefficient, and this performance penalty means that alternative solutions are needed for achieving very high data rates.
In order to achieve very high data rates on narrowband wireless channels, many antennas are needed at both the transmitter and the receiver. Consider a wireless communication system employing n transmit and m receive antennas, where the subchannel between each transmit and receive antenna is quasi-static Rayleigh, flat, and independent of others. If n is fixed, then the capacity increases logarithmically with m. On the other hand, if m is fixed then intuition suggests that there must come a point where adding more transmit antennas will not make much difference. Indeed, this can be seen in the mathematics of outage capacity, shown by Foschini and Gans in the aforementioned paper. Thus, it turns out that, in the presence of one receive antenna, little can be gained in terms of outage capacity by using more than 4 transmit antennas. A similar argument shows that if there are two receive antennas, using 6 transmitting antennas provides almost all of the capacity increase that can be obtained.
If n increases and m.gtoreq.n, then information theory shows that the capacity of the system increases at least linearly as a function of n. Thus, it makes sense to increase the number of antennas at both receiver and transmitter in order to obtain higher capacities. Employing many antennas at both transmitter and receiver create a multiple-input multiple-output system where the number of degrees of freedom is given by the product of the number of transmit and receive antennas.
Foschini considered such a system in "Layered space-time architecture for wireless communication in a fading environment when using multi-element antennas," Bell Labs Technical Journal, Vol. 1, No. 2, Autumn 1996. He proposed a multi-layered structure that, in principle, can achieve a tight lower bound on the capacity. If n transmit and n receive antennas are used, then at the receiver the transmitted signal from transmit antenna 1 is treated as the desired signal, while the signals transmitted from other transmit antennas are treated as interference. Linear processing is then used to suppress the interfering signals using n receive antennas, providing a diversity gain of one. Once the signal transmitted from antenna 1 is correctly detected, the signal transmitted from antenna 2 is treated as the desired signal while the signals transmitted from transmit antennas 3, 4, . . . , n are treated as interference. The contribution of the signal transmitted from antenna 1, now that it has been detected, is subtracted from the signal received at receiver antennas 1 through n. Thereafter, detection of the signal transmitted by antenna 2 proceeds with linear processing that is applied to suppress the interfering signals from antennas 3 through n. This provides a diversity gain of two. This process is repeated until all the transmitted signals are detected. Clearly, the worst case diversity in this architecture is one. For such a system, long frames of data combined with powerful coding techniques are needed to achieve the lower bound on outage capacity.